Before Londoner Linda Whitehead stepped onto a pitch in Goa, India with a team of female soccer players earlier this month, each one passed her a note describing what they expected from their new Canadian mentor.

What she read would stick with Whitehead for the rest of her experience in Goa, where she volunteered to coach Aug. 5-13 during a combination soccer/women’s rights festival organized by German NGO Discover Football.

“Almost every player said, ‘I don’t want to be yelled at by the coach,’” said Whitehead, a professor at Fanshawe College not far removed from a coaching career with the Ontario and Canadian soccer associations. “When I started talking to the Indian coaches, I found that’s very much the environment (the players) find themselves in, so that was easy for me because that’s not my style anyways.

“I just tried to introduce them to a lot of fun activities on the field … because when you’re having fun you don’t realize how much you’re learning or how hard you’re working,” Whitehead continued. “That’s my philosophy. I think the players really liked that because they hadn’t really experienced the game like that before, so we got along famously right from the start. They just soaked up every word.”

The players, about 80 altogether from various parts of India, weren’t the only ones learning lessons over the course of the festival — an effort to use soccer as a tool to empower young women and challenge traditional gender stereotypes. Whitehead said she and the seven other international coaches at the event took plenty of lessons away from their opportunity to coach players struggling to pursue sports in a culture with traditionally rigid gender roles.

Some of those lessons even came on the field. During a few workshops, Whitehead said elements of soccer — the ball, sidelines, and goal — became metaphors for women’s rights, barriers to gender equality, and physical and mental health.

Delivering those themes to a group of women obsessed with soccer seemed to work well, Whitehead said.

“I’ve never seen it framed that way so it was very interesting for me.”

Yet despite the differences between Indian culture and the ones represented by Whitehead and her colleagues, similarities weren’t difficult to find during the festival’s seven days. One thing Whitehead said she had in common with nearly everyone participating was not only a love for soccer, but also a story about overcoming barriers to earn the right to play the game in the first place.

Whitehead’s story begins at nine years old when she was kicked off her brother’s soccer team because she was a girl. Eventually, as she explained to the Londoner in an interview prior to the festival, Whitehead did find opportunities to play competitively and later developed a rewarding career in coaching.

She hopes her story encourages female players in India and elsewhere not to back down from pursuing soccer at the highest levels possible.

“Some of them are still being told they shouldn’t play because they’re girls,” Whitehead said. “I said, ‘hey, look, when I was a kid people told me that and I became a professional coach. I’m 55 and I’m still involved in the sport, so don’t let anybody tell you (that) you can’t do it.’

“That’s maybe the biggest message I have for those players. I can say I was where you were and look what I’ve been allowed to do. So don’t give up hope, keep fighting for what you want, keep playing. We’re still working towards getting it right in Canada, we’re still working towards getting it right in the US, we’re working just as hard as you are in India to try and get it right.”

Whitehead has now travelled to India twice as a volunteer soccer coach.

“I think what hit me more this time than last time was how overwhelming their challenges are in India because there’s just so many people and it’s such a vast country with so many different things going on,” she said.

But she still feels that she’s made a difference.

“This is just a drop in the bucket, absolutely, but the bucket is full of drops, right?

You’ve got to start somewhere (and) even if all we did was give women in India seven days of freedom to be themselves on the football field … that’s worth a huge amount in my book, but I think we accomplished more than that.”